Clear Your Cookies For Google Instant Access

Been trying to access Google Instant from Australia and not having any luck? If you've tested all the standard fixes, clearing the cookies in your browser might do the trick.

Google Instant hasn't yet officially launched on the Google.com.au domain (Google says that this will happen but hasn't announced a specific date). We ran a bunch of suggestions for getting access to the US site (essentially, using various addresses to go directly to the Google US domain and making sure you're signed into a Google domain) and readers contributed some more suggestions (such as using the Google Global extension or switching to Google Public DNS).

If all those options fail — as they did for me on my main machine — then another option worth exploring (and which the Google Australia team suggested to me) is clearing your cookies. It turns out that Google deliberately "held back" a small percentage of random accounts so that it could assess performance of Instant versus the old interface. If you happen to fall into that group, then clearing your browser cookies will get rid of that problem and enable access using the methods described above.

A quick cookie-clearing guide for our most popular browsers: In Firefox, go to Tools —> Clear Recent History and select the 'Cookies' option but no others, then click 'Clear now'; in Chrome, go to Wrench —> Options, go to the 'Under the Hood' tab, select 'Clear browsing data' and make sure 'Delete cookies and other site data' is selected, then click 'Clear browsing data'; in Internet Explorer, go to Tools —> Delete Browsing History, make sure Cookies is selected and click 'Delete; in Safari, go to Edit —> Preferences, select the 'Security' tab, click on 'Show cookies' and then click 'Remove all'.

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Comments

Wobble Guest

Sep 21, 2010, 11:40pm

I don't want to clear all my cookies. Are there any specific domains which should be cleared rather than all of them? eg. google.com or google.com.au or other?

If you want to find out how crappy Google Instant really is, and how it takes control over your web browser, then just log into the main Google website, and you will be appalled. "www.google.com" You'll be glad you don't have it yet, it forces your choices on you, restricting your search answers, and clogging up your web browser with spyware. Believe me this is no joke! But if you have to find out how bad it really is for yourself, go for it!!

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